Digging for Roman clues in blitzed streets

It was during the years from 1945 to 1954 that the first significant archaeology took place in the centre of Canterbury. Of course, much of the city’s south east quadrant had been flattened by the bombing of the Second World War, particularly during 1942. And so, amateur archaeologists seized the opportunity to dig in the blitzed cellars and abandoned back gardens of this area, before the redevelopment took place.

The term I first coined for this late 1940s period is the Buddleia Years, after the Victorian-introduced shrub that seeded itself all round the bomb sites.

The first of the above pictures shows principal archaeologist, Sheppard Frere, left, overseeing the mechanical clearance of a large bomb site between Iron Bar Lane and Canterbury Lane, during the summer of 1949.

Designated Area R, the site subsequently yielded a small 16th century cellar and the junction of two Roman roads. And it was this dig, and many others like it, during these Buddleia Years, which enabled a far more accurate map of Roman Canterbury to be created than had hitherto existed. Parked cars and a surviving garage, along the devastated Iron Bar Lane frontage, can also be seen beyond the tree saplings and clumps of the ubiquitous plant.

The second photo, from 1997, shows the somewhat utilitarian flat-roofed shop buildings that had been built on either side of a widened Iron Bar Lane in the late 1950s. Also created at about the same time, was the new Link Lane, to enable better access to the unloading area created as part of the post-war Iron Bar Lane.

The west side of the lane has since been redeveloped on a much larger scale.

Archaeologists near Iron Bar Lane in 1949 and the same scene around 50 years later